Wolfsburg, in Lower Saxony, located in the northwestern quadrant of Germany, is a bright, low-slung industrial city of 125,000, with the sort of modern look of curvilinear roofs and Cubist glass architecture that qualified as futuristic in the 1950s. The main attraction is a vast, open-air museum dedicated to automobiles, aptly titled the Autostadt, that attracts 2 million visitors a year. The skyline is broken only by four tall, dark- reddish smokestacks. “Wolfsburg” is actually an alias. Once upon a time, the city was called Stadt des KdF-Wagens bei Fallersleben: the “City of the Strength Through Joy Car at Fallersleben,” Fallersleben being the nearest town. The car is better known as the Volkswagen, Adolf Hitler’s “people’s car,” and Wolfsburg is still the company’s headquarters and home of its main factory—the largest single auto factory in the world. These days, Wolfsburg is rightfully wracked with anxiety, as the company is embroiled in a massive scandal over rigging its vehicles’ emissions devices to report less pollution than the cars actually belch. The inescapable conclusion is that Volkswagen housed crooks.
About five miles northeast of Wolfsburg lies the village of Rühen. With a population of just 5,000, it’s as small, green, and bucolic as Wolfsburg is sprawling, gray-white, and industrial. It is the quintessence of German quaintness. But this, too, is something of an illusion. Rühen is closely linked to Wolfsburg and to Volkswagen. This calm and pastoral village is the place where Volkswagen’s original sin occurred, the place where it engaged in blood crimes rather than emissions cheating, the place where, almost inconceivably, its executives proved even more reprehensible than the local Nazi Gauleiters.
The Nation
Hitler's slave labour wagon. slave labor era blood crimes
VW had a Jetta plant which it closed in 1988. It was Union.
150,000 auto workers union and about 150,000 non-union. total in America.
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